Re: Where are the Linked Data Driven Smart Agents (Bots) ?

On 7/6/16 12:38 PM, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This is a very important question for our community,
> given that smart agents once were an important theme.
> Actually, the main difference we could bring with the SemWeb
> is that our clients could be decentralized
> and actually run on the client side, in contrast to others.
>
> One of the main problems I see is how our community
> (now particularly thinking about the scientific subgroup)
> receives submissions of novel work.
> We have evolved into an extremely quantitative-oriented view,
> where anything that can be measured with numbers
> is largely favored over anything that cannot.
>
> Given that the smart agents / bots field is quite new,
> we don't know the right evaluation metrics yet.
> As such, it is hard to publish a paper on this
> at any of the main venues (ISWC / ESWC / …).
> This discourages working on such themes.
>
> Hence, I see much talent and time going to
> incremental research, which is easy to evaluate well,
> but not necessarily as ground-breaking.
> More than a decade of SemWeb research
> has mostly brought us intelligent servers,
> but not yet the intelligent clients we wanted.
>
> So perhaps we should phrase the question more broadly:
> how can we as a community be more open
> to novel and disruptive technologies?
>
> Best,
>
> Ruben

Hi Ruben,

On my part, I am really pinging the community (due to deafening silence)
about a pendulum swing back to its fundamental strengths--structured
data (represented as sentences) endowed with machine- and
human-comprehensible entity relationship type semantics.

Eons ago (Semweb time) use of various Bots (Jenni [1], Micro Turtle [2],
Phenny [3], and friends) on IRC channels was the norm. Those agents were
early Semantic Web utility demos confined to IRC rather than the broader
Web.

Twitter and Slack are just pretty looking modern variants of what IRC
delivers, as most folks in this community certainly already know.

Today, we have an opportunity to rehash, recast, port, or build new bots
performing the very same tasks, but across a Web of (Linked) Data.

Fundamentally, mercurial GUI oriented UI/UX should be less of a hurdle
to Linked Data and Semantic Web utility showcases. Why? Because bot
interactions are predominantly about conversational interfaces that
ultimately depend on the ability to process information encoded using
sentences, and In RDF (the Language) we have the ultimate tool for
compact sentence representation :)

Links

[1]
http://www.zoharbabin.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/irc-log-kc-search-module.png
-- Jenni bot

[2]
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/63/25/37/632537949aeea66cbf7aa8fba73c9e46.jpg
-- Micro Turtle Bot

[3]
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/d1/e9/6a/d1e96adb4fcb720659db75aaa3e38b92.jpg
-- Phenny Bot.

-- 
Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      
Founder & CEO 
OpenLink Software     
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